English Is Easy, Isn't It?

While I was teaching in the University of Mercu Buana, Kranggan, Bekasi, a lot of my college students asked me, "Sir, how can I improve our English easily?". The question sounds familiar. Why? Because, yes, there are a lot of people who have big motivation to study English, but they don't know the right way to make it become easy.

I smiled at them, of couse, because I like when people ask me about the right ways to improve English skills. To me, having big motivation isn't enough to be good at English. It's like you have a dream but you never know an appropriate strategy to achieve it.

Well, here, I have only one sentence to answer the question: "Love English". Yes, guys, you must love English first if you want to be good at English soon. Wise people have ever said, "Someone who loves something will do everything to be able to master it". For instance, if you love music, and you're eager to be good at playing guitar, of course, automathically all your desires encourage you to live by practicing guitar. You will buy a guitar, you will go to a music course place, you will buy books about guitar. Even, when you're sleeping, you will dream you're a guitar master.

So, what about English? 

It's not far different! If you love English, you will do everything to achieve it. Let me direct you to the right ways to be able to improve your English. First of all, you must buy a guidance book (Grammar book), then you can study autodidactly, when you get difficulties in comprehending a theory, you can go to your English teachers, and don't ever feel shy to ask them about your problem. Secondly, use your hobbies to support your English. For instance, you like watching movies, so watch a lot of movies with English speaking and subtitles, and then if you find new vocabularies, you can remember them. It is also good to practice the actors's English accents an expressions in the movies. Or, if you like listening to music, you can listen to English songs--it's better to take from your favorite singers or bands' songs--and then you can note their lyrics, and get new vocabularies, new expressions.

Finally, I hope this short writing can give you a bit enlightenment about how easy English is!

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Be Wise, That's the KEY

Living in this world isn’t as easy as we think. There are a lot of temptations coming and leaving in our life. All those provoke our emotion, and knock down our patience. In the end, when the sun is burning our head at noon, and the cold wind is crushing to bits our body in the evening, we feel frustrated. Even, we directly think that we have failed in this life, and prefer to run from the temptations, lose of hope.

Normally, we are most afraid of age. Time running very fast everyday, drags our life into older and older, so that, it’s slowly but sure, our confidence becomes less and less. However, we will never be able to run from this destiny. This is what we must accept, and build up our awareness that we have to take benefits along our ages. This consciousness should also be supported by our attitudes and behaviors. And the most important is that we need to have an attitude of wisdom in which this attitude can be a key of our success in this world.

Being wise is a gift from God. If We always behave our problems without any regrets and complains, we will undergo our life easily. It is because God has decorated our soul with wisdom, so that the problems we are facing, are hoped not to make us frustrated, even loses of hope. We should see our problems not only by using our own eyes, but we ought to see the problems with our mind’s eye too. So That, the more problem attacking us day by day, we can be wiser and wiser. In the end, when we win, we won't be arrogant, but modest. Moreover if we fail, they will always try to get lessons of their failures, and promise to ourselves that we will never make the same mistakes in the future.

However, it seems that the advance of period has erased the wisdom in our heart. This fact makes so many riots and violence to come to the surface of this life. We have even forgotten how to be a person who appreciates our logical mind. We can’t even hear white voices in our heart. We’re now like an animal that more follows our passion just for survival. In this situation, discussions become useless. We indirectly reform jungle-law in which the strongest oppresses the weakest, and the weakest tries to survive by rebelling—not rebelling for the truth but for being a thief. What a life! We can just be a watcher, or maybe a lover who enjoys this situation. Our wisdom fades away from our soul.

Now, before the situation becomes worse, it’s time for us to see again deep inside our heart. Can we still feel smarting when a sewing needle stabs our body? Can we still feel cold when we take off our clothes in the cold evening? If we think that we can still feel them all, it means we are still human being. We still have feelings in our heart. So we must change the way of our life. We must stop all pessimistic thoughts, and become wiser in thinking of this life, especially in thinking of all realities in this world. Finally, we must get back the wisdom in our soul. We must re-lighten wisdom, so that we will not go down in this world easily. And of course, we finally realize that to make our dreams come true, we must keep forever the only key of success; that is WISDOM…

(In my room, 25-May-2010 - 01:00 AM)

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The Dream must Come True

When we were born, we were naked. We didn’t bring anything into this world. And then, we grow up. At the first five years, we could only understand that something was exciting, and another thing was annoying, even it’s dangerous. After that, we entered our school. There, we started to adore someone or an occupation, so that we could say easily, “I want to be a pilot” or “I want to be Spiderman”. The second one is the funniest. The impact of Television seems to have made some children play in their empty dream. However, this isn’t a big deal. The point is we, when we’re still a child, could still notice our dream. It is different after we step into our teenager, adolescence, and old period. When we step those periods, we seem to be difficult identifying our dreams. Though, we all really agree that our dreams must come true.
Therefore, from the last sentence of the paragraph above, it is clear that we won’t never be able to make our dreams come true before we’re able to know what kind of dream that we want. And it is also clear that our blindness of our dream makes most of us get lost in this life, so that there are some of us forget the importance of achieving our dream and would rather shift our life by doing something useless, such as consuming drugs, spending our night-life in clubs, and even doing some criminal actions.
Now, let’s think how well we understand that dreams are important for us? And then, why don’t we try to find out the meaning of a real dream in this life? Some of us probably think that we just do it, and we don’t have to think about it. How come? Can we do a journey in a desert without any maps that can lead us to get our goals? Of course not, guys. It is as same as we suicide, and make us loose of hope in the end. I think we all refuse to be in this situation, don’t we?
Well, actually, there are some benefits if we plan our dream first before we do efforts to realize it. First, if we know our dream, at least we can do some preparation. We can set some strategies, our best strategies, to make it come true. Secondly, we’ll be more ready if we fail, and this fact won’t make us loose of hope, because we have considered the consequences and the risks before, so it can push ourselves to check our mistakes again why we fail, and of course after we find the mistakes, we’ll be more confident to continue our efforts.
Guys, believe it or not, a dream is like music. We must like the music first, then we can enjoy it, even we can try to make our own music, and if we can create our own music successfully, though other people may see our music is bad, we won’t care of them, because we feel satisfied with a result coming from our own creation, and of course, by this time we have one new idea to make much better music at the future. Yeah, the point is that the first success can motivate our heart to achieve better success.
Finally, no matter what, we must decide what dream we want to achieve now. Whatever that is, we don’t have to feel afraid and pessimistic that the dream is too high or abstract. We will never know our destiny. But we must trust that nothing is impossible in this life. So that’s why, as God creatures, all we can do is trying and trying as best as we can. Yeah, guys, it is our sublime duty to make our dreams come true. Come on, God is waiting for our dreams now…. (^_^)

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